Interview & Transcript with Jody McIntyre

I think my favourite part is this:

Interviewer: There’s a suggestion that you were rolling towards the police in your wheelchair. Is that true?

JM: I think justifying a police officer pulling a disabled person out of a wheelchair and dragging them across a concrete road is quite ridiculous and I’m surprised that you’ve just tried to do so.

Interview: So that’s not true, you were not wheeling yourself towards the police.

JM: Well I can’t physically use my wheelchair myself. My brother was pushing me. I think it’s quite obvious from the footage that I was 100% not a threat to anyone.

( 8 min video )

( transcript )

Head's Up Seven Up*

1) I have an ingrown toenail and it hurts. Life is so hard. (I'm soaking it in salt water and trying not to pick at it.)

2) I'm in full-out thesising mode at the moment which means I go to school, write, come home at some wretched hour, sleep, go back to school. Don's the lump in the bed that I vaguely remember liking. :(

3) Except tonight, because tonight may or may not be Katie & Emmy night. Katie is leaving me. To go to Ontario. Personal Betrayal!

4) Flatsandclaps on Tumblr linked me to The BBC's response to public outcry about Jody's interview last night, which can be summed up as "I don't think any of you have any reason to complain." I note that the people who are complaining (119 comments when last I looked) haven't brought up my issue, which is the "appears to have been pulled from his wheelchair" bit at the beginning of the interview. (Everyone brought up the "You were rolling toward the police! In your manual wheelchair!") I don't know - is that a policy at the BBC? When they showed Charles & Camilla's picture after they were directed into caught up in the protests, did they say "Allegedly caught up in"? I don't know. So I haven't brought that up.

5) Every time I look at my inbox I cry. One thing I'm looking forward to when I'm done with FWD is unsubbing from many many many email lists that I'm on just for information purposes. So. Many. Emails. :(

6) I know many of you are living in the Snowpocalypse. I'm sorry. We had the Wind & Rain Pocalypse last night which I walked home in, but that just meant I was awake enough when I got home to indulge in the final episode of Lost Girl.

7) Don's mom sent cookies. YAY COOKIES!




* Did anyone else play that game as a kid?

(no subject)

Via the F-Word UK, the Daily Mail decided to mock Jody McIntyre for rioting while crippled.

No, really. Here's The Guardian's discussion of the 500 complaints the column has garnered so far.

One tweeter described Littlejohn as "shameful [for] mocking the disabled". Another, referring to the Mail's coverage of Frankie Boyle's joke on Channel 4 about Katie Price's son, said: "When Frankie Boyle makes jokes about disabled people, the Mail complains. When Littlejohn does it, the Mail prints it."

(Not that the Daily Mail is somehow unique in this. I've pointed before to left-wing blogs and sites mocking people with disabilities for being out while disabled when protesting against stuff the left generally approves of, but when a disabled person is protesting on behalf of the left - especially when they're injured or attacked by police - it suddenly becomes worth supporting the rights of disabled people to protest. We notice these things, you know.)

Anyway, sorry. You'll have to scroll down a ways to get to the Daily Mail's mockery of Jody, but it includes a rather iconic drawing of Joey and his brother as characters from a show called Little Britain. I'm only dimly aware of it as that's not my sense of humour so I just didn't watch, and thus can't come up with something comparable in other countries.